cost of listings need help answering my question?

[dobo5250]

after reading here that the cost of listing now has risen to .35 per month plus tax, from when I started it was .17 plus tx that's when I started using the store idea to reduce costs ( see no other advantage to a store other than to save listings fees but then I had 2700 listings )-- so my question is this I have approx 1575 listings, varying a little each month from 1500 to 1625  listings,my store cost 89 dollars now a month for the store - so my question is,it still better for me to use the store price to list or save that money and then use individual listing fees ? i understand you get 250 free listings a month to start with, are there any advantages to using individual listings? over store listings set price, per month, does that 250 free listings vary from month to month ?? with my sales so slow about a one a week now -  due to the postal dispute causing people to be hesitate to order s much as they used to ----- I send all my goods priority if I can afford it even if means to losing  a little money ,to keep my regular customers happy, new ones I send expedited to make sure it gets there as fast a possible, so they feel more confident to order, at least till June 21st then we will see, most of my customers are rural or out west or up up north types or all three, so other forms of delivery are mostly out of the question or they charge tooooo much.  56 dollars for a 29.99 Canada postal delivery, the usual price.     just trying to save money to stay in the game. my other costs I can do nothing about them, storage cost, supplies etc Recently my storage unit company started charging their own insurance rates on the locker contents, its mandatory, raising costs about  25 dollars a month.    

[ricarmic]

A caveat that I haven't done anything investigative wise aside from math....

If you carry 1,500 items a month, and you were charged 35c each less 250, the math says you'd be paying:

1,250 x .35 = $437.50 which would make $89 appear very economical.

As I understand it from the old days at least, once you go above the "free" 250 listings, it doesn't take long to make the stores much more economical.

I may stand corrected by others with more knowledge regarding store/non store complexities (I've had a store since they were invented).

As a note, I don't recall anyone saying here anything about there being any visibility advantage to a non-store listing vs a store listing.

[ypdc_dennis]

Other advantage of a store is a smaller Final-Value-Fee ... for most categories you save 0.9% -- not much, but the savings can make a difference. 

It sounds like you have a Premium store:

up to 10,000 buy-it-now + 500 auctions (in select categories) each month with no insertion listing fee

* If you are willing to commit to an annual (12 month) contract, you can reduce the fee by $15/month.

The next step down is a Basic store:

up to 1000 buy-it-now + 250 auctions (in select categories) each month with no insertion listing fee

with 20 cents (+ tax) for any extra buy-it-now listings

*  You would save $50 on the monthly fee, but have to pay $100 extra in listing fees for 1500 listings.

Basic store is only cheaper than Premium store if you have less than 1250 buy-it-now listings per month -- or a few more listings if you can take advantage of using the 250 "free insertion" auctions.

Not having a store is only cheaper than Basic store if you have less than 335 monthly listings.

 -;-

Note: What I call buy-it-now listing is the same as what ebay calls fixed-price listing.